Of late, parties have taken recourse to rumour-mongering and propaganda to meet their political ends. This very month, senior leader of Congress Kamal Nath was called out for spreading misinformation by tweeting a fake photo.
New Delhi: In this age of fake news, the Election Commission of India has proposed to hold a workshop with officials of social media giant Facebook to devise strategies of preventing the misuse of its platform during polls.
While addressing a press conference, chief election commissioner (CEC) OP Rawat said, the commission had directed officials to address the issues of alleged discrepancies and bogus voters in the electoral rolls and rectify them after field visits.
Elections to the 119-member Telangana assembly will be held on December 7. Apart from Telangana, four other states too are going to polls — Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Mizoram.
Apart from the traditional methods like checking bogus voters and transfers of officials, the EC this time is banking heavily on the cooperation from Facebook. The CEC said the proposed workshop would be held to discuss efforts to prevent the misuse of its platform. He said, "Before leaving for Hyderabad, I had a meeting with a Facebook team in Delhi.We are going to organise a workshop with them to further strengthen these arrangements (to prevent the misuse of social media) so that we can prevent any adverse impact on these elections. Not only these elections, even the Lok Sabha elections.”
The CEC, however, did not specify when the workshop would be organised.
Of late, parties have taken recourse to rumour-mongering and propaganda to meet their political ends. This very month, senior leader of Congress Kamal Nath was called out for spreading misinformation by tweeting a fake photo, claiming it to be that of Madhya Pradesh. Similarly, at the ground level, different Facebook groups see such deliberate misinformation been spread by candidates. This has become a common practice to malign political opponents.
Often, photos from Pakistan are circulated, passing off the people seen in the images as Indian Muslims to highlight supposed plight of the minority. Roads of western countries are posted by ruling parties as their achievement in building infrastructure. Keeping that in mind, a helping hand from Facebook is something the EC is banking on so that such questionable contents are identified and removed from its popular platform.
Meanwhile, complying with Supreme Court’s directions, the poll panel has issued a modified format of the affidavit to be filled in by candidates and political parties, disclosing their criminal antecedents, Rawat said, adding that it should be publicised by the media.
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